Difference between revisions of "Cooper Stevens"

Revision as of 06:34, 19 February 2021

A Short Introduction

I am tasked with going incognito and gathering all the information on someone of particular interest. I don't have anything on this person except a name: "Cooper Stevens." In the interest of gaining recognition from potential employers and recruiters, he has spent a good deal of time in the last few years curating information sources about himself, and deliberately publishing them publicly on the internet. In my investigation to find information about him, I was especially contented to easily find those sources that he had curated (meaning that recruiters could also find them easily). However, upon digging further into the internet's search results, I found some remains left behind from his digital footprint (that is, information that he did not curate and publish, but rather information gathered on him just by merely having an active presence on the internet).

Through this investigation, we will see that the information he provided in these publications practically makes up his entire online identity. This observation paired with the fact that he keeps these publications up-to-date with his personal information will allow us to conclude that his online identity is accurate, authentic, and stable.

Googling Myself

My deliberate online identity

When I search my name "Cooper Stevens" on Google, the sources about me that come up on the first page of results are my Facebook, my LinkedIn, and my Next College Student Athlete (NCSA) profile. To my delight, these are three of the four profiles that I have taken the time to curate and publish for all the internet to see!

My Facebook and LinkedIn profiles make public information about my age, education, work history, homes and cities I have lived in, and a few photos of me. Since I regularly update my information on these sites, this data is clearly accurate, authentic, and stable. This is not all of the information these sites provide, however. On both of these sites, I have posted a link to my portfolio website.

My public portfolio website contains a lot more personal information about me, ranging from my significant other to my hobbies, to favorite vacations, to my academic research. This is by design so that I can easily refer potential employers to this website so that they may better get to know me as a person (as opposed to just as a candidate). This website also contains my professional contact information and a lot more pictures of me. Since I regularly update my information on my portfolio website, this data is clearly accurate, authentic, and stable.

The next website that comes up in a Google search is my NCSA profile for tennis. This was a profile that I had set up during high school so that college recruiters could more easily find me and get in contact. It provides a different type of personal information, including my height, weight, my Universal Tennis Rating, and the position I played in high school. However, this information is out-of-date as these stats have changed over the last two years. Frankly, I had forgotten I made this profile. Perhaps this information is due to be updated (or deleted, as I no longer have a use for this recruitment profile).

My online identity as a result of my digital footprint

Despite the extreme ease of access of most everything you might reasonably look to find out about me all in one place on my portfolio website, there still remained a few bits and pieces of data about me scattered throughout the internet. All of these sites that I will discuss (besides Facebook) were found on pages on or after the fifth page of search results! Needless to say, these were not so easy to find, especially when compared to my four curated profiles which all could be found with the first page of search results.

Nothing but a name

The first part of my digital footprint that I found in a search was located at the bottom of my Facebook profile page. Here is where it became clear that Facebook tracks and makes public information that I did not know Facebook was even tracking. They make claims about my "favorite" things which are by-no-means correct. Not only do I not want these “favorites” of mine publicly available, but I do not know why they are being tracked by Facebook.

This prompted me to do some investigation into Facebook's data tracking policies. In this investigation, I found that Facebook advertises that “We store data until it is no longer necessary to provide our services and Facebook Products, or until your account is deleted - whichever comes first”^[1]. Surely, remembering that I played a game called “Game of Thieves” does not constitute data that is “necessary to provide [Facebook’s] services.” Yet the data remains stored. With this, we can see that Facebook’s data policies are sufficiently vague that “necessary to provide service” can mean most anything, thus giving them reason to retain the data (that is, until I delete my account).

The next piece of my digital footprint that I stumbled upon was my Quora account that I have not used in a year or two. Here, every single Quora question that I ever answered is linked. Looking through my answers, you can quickly see that I am a huge fan of recreational mathematics and physics, but you can’t tell much else from them. However, another part of my Quora account that is public is a list of my subject interests. I figured Quora would keep these private and use them only to provide better content suggestions. While this discovery was surprising, it was not concerning as I had already chosen to express my passions for these topics in my online portfolio.

Digging deeper into the pages of search results, I was startled by the abundance of data brokers that had certain information about me. Some of this information included a list of my family members and neighbors, and even a personal email addresses that I have not explicitly shared online. I will point out, however, that some of these data brokers had information on me that was downright false. For example, one claimed that pkie****@ameritrade.com is my email address (it most definitely is not). The only correct information I found to be behind a paywall was the personal email address 0cpr****@gmail.com. Still, though, this information is ineffectual in trying to get to know me as a person, and I hardly use that email address anymore anyways (too much spam).

Honing in

Since I was able to figure out the education history of "Cooper Stevens" by only searching the name, I then was able to make my search more specific by adding schools that Cooper Stevens has attended to the search query.

In this search query's first few pages of results, I started to find information about myself that I didn't even know about! For example, I found a Disc Golf bracket that I took part in, many publications of my high school tennis team’s performance in tournaments^[2][3][4][5], and even a long-standing 2-mile race record I hold at my middle-school. While this information is all correct, the only information it can really provide about me is that I am an athletic person. Note, however, that I had already made this characteristic of mine public on my online portfolio.

The last few pieces of publicly available information that I found came directly from the University of Michigan. This information included my award of the 2020 William J. Branstrom Prize^[6], and my current work schedule at the University of Michigan’s Math Lab. I did not expect my award to be so easily found, nor did I expect my work schedule to be publicly available. I had already made knowledge of my award public, and while the thought of anyone being able to find my work schedule is a bit unsettling, this data is nonetheless unhelpful in constructing my online identity as I had already published that work for the Math Lab.

Conclusion

As we have seen, there is a great variety of my personal information publicly available online as a result of my digital footprint. But we have also seen that this information was not only difficult to find (all sites were found on last few pages of search results or required additional information in the query), but also very sparse: we never found more than a fact or two on any one site. Moreover, nearly all of the data that could be gathered from my digital footprint was redundant with what I had deliberately published, with the exception of Facebook's incorrect reporting of my "favorite" things and my work schedule.

The fact that the data from my digital footprint is unimportant to my character, redundant with my own published content, and hard to find paired with the fact that my deliberately published information is abundant and very easy to obtain tells us that the data that I purposefully published would dominate in any assessment of my online identity. As a result, we can see that it was to my benefit to curate and publish my own information instead of leaving my online identity to be determined solely by my digital footprint. In doing so, not only is my digital footprint over-shadowed and largely silenced, but I got to choose exactly how my online identity would be perceived, as determined by what I choose to publish. This means that by meticulously curating, coordinating, and publishing content about myself, I can change my online identity on a whim! But there is nothing special about me that allows me to do this: anyone can!

Hence, the power of publishing one's own content about their character is clear: not only can they make their online identity whatever they want it to be, but they are sure to reach a larger audience (possibly recruiters!) with their easily-accessible publications. I will note, however, that this is no easy task: it requires a good deal of work to create the content, but also the coordination of this content between all of your public profiles. Then, regular maintenance on this content is required in order to keep it up-to-date.

Since this is the case, though, it follows that, with sufficient work, anyone can construct a fake persona of themselves online. Attempting to use such a façade to fraudulently obtain something is known as phishing, and it does indeed happen on a variety of scales. Such an observation begs the question: why do we search people up online at all if we can't know if this information is representative of the person?

This sparse data from my digital footprint is clearly over-shadowed by the data which I chose to make available. To see this, consider what my online identity would be without my curated sites: it would consist mostly of old athletic records, my Quora account, my Facebook “favorites”, my junk email address, voter information (including age, gender, address, political affiliations, etc.), and my content from the University of Michigan (including my award and my Math Lab work schedule. This collection is by no means indicative of my person! For example, it completely misses my recent athletic endeavors such as Rowing and Ultimate Frisbee, and it misses my devotion to computer science completely. Such a collection would be stable, yet out-of-date and unrepresentative. Instead, what we have is an online identity that is stable, up-to-date, and accurate, but also with the benefit of editable by me.

This overshadowing is evident in that the three sites that I made intentionally are the first to appear in a Google search, and in that there is a lot more data on these three sites than all the others combined – this density of well-put-together information decreases the need to look elsewhere for anyone looking to find information on me. Since the need to look is decreased, fewer investigators will keep looking and eventually find those sites that I did not curate (i.e. those that came from my digital footprint). These websites were very difficult for me to find.

Thus, the benefit to curating your own online identity is clear! Not only can you choose what information you make prominent on your online identity, but you can also “drown” out the parts of that identity that are not as desirable. And you have the benefit of the capability to change your identity by changing which information you make prominent and provide.

References

1. ↑ Facebook. (2021, January 11). Data Policy. Retrieved February 18, 2021.
2. ↑ Macomb Daily Sports. (2016, August 26). ROUNDUP: Wins for Utica, Dakota, Cousino. MIPrepZone. Retrieved February 18, 2021.
3. ↑ Macomb Daily Sports. (2015, August 31). Summaries for Aug. 31, 2015. MIPrepZone. Retrieved February 18, 2021.
4. ↑ Macomb Daily Sports. (2015, August 24). TENNIS RESULTS 8/24. MIPrepZone. Retrieved February 18, 2021.
5. ↑ Vest, Mark. (2017, September 25). Chippewa Valley boys tennis wins MAC Blue dual meet championship. C&G Newspapers. Retrieved February 18, 2021.
6. ↑ The University of Michigan. (2020, March 15). "The University of Michigan's 97th Annual Honors Convocation". Ann Arbor; The University of Michigan. Page 114. Retrieved February 18, 2021.